Space tourism ready to launch

RAMIN RAHIMIAN: NEW YORK TIMES
HER DREAM IS 'GO': Ex-NASA mission controller Catherine Culver, who has a reservation for a commercial flight into space, models her flight suit at her home in San Jose, Calif.

Photo: RAMIN RAHIMIAN

To go to outer space, Catherine Culver went to a travel agent.

The first flights of the new airlines that will take tourists past the edge of space are poised to take off in 2012, and getting a seat on one is not all that different from booking a trip someplace on Earth.

You can sign up on the website of, say, Virgin Galactic, the most prominent of the new space tourism companies, or go to a travel agent and put down a hefty deposit.

Soon you will be able to buy travel insurance, just as you can for any other vacation.

Virgin Galactic intends to start offering flights just beyond the space barrier on a rocket ship it has built, featuring five minutes of weightlessness during a 2½-hour jaunt.

At $200,000 a seat, this will open the final frontier.

"Hopefully by next Christmas, myself, my daughter and my son will be the first people to go up into space," Richard Branson, the owner of Virgin Galactic, said in a videotaped interview in November.

Paid her deposit

Culver, who has worked as a mission controller at NASA and now gives motivational talks, has always wanted to go to space.

She applied four times to become a NASA astronaut, with no luck.

To book her spaceflight, she wanted a face-to-face conversation, so she looked through the list of Virgin's space agents and was pleased to find one near her San Jose, Calif., home.

Soon afterward, Culver put down her $20,000 deposit, becoming one of 475 people who have reserved a place on a Virgin Galactic flight.

Most have already paid the full ticket price to rise above the 62-mile altitude threshold that is considered the entrance to outer space.

(People who pay in full will get the first seats.)

At least two other specialty airlines have jumped in as well, taking reservations (and deposits) for future space flights.

Allianz, the big insurer, will introduce an insurance product in 2012, lending space tourism the trappings of the regular travel industry.

"Just to be able to sell space travel as a regular part of your business, really, just how cool is that?" said Lynda Turley Garrett, president of Alpine Travel of Saratoga, Calif., who is one of 58 accredited space agents for Virgin Galactic in the United States.

In five years, she has sold three seats.

By 2017, Garrett predicted, "It'll be just like scheduling a flight to LA."

Lining up to launch

Virgin Galactic is not the only one with paying customers. XCOR Aerospace of Mojave, Calif., has more than 100 reservations for a $95,000 seat on its small space plane, which will have just two seats - one for the pilot and one for the passenger.

XCOR could begin flying as soon as 2013.

And Space Adventures Ltd. of Vienna, Va., which has been taking reservations for a while at $110,000 a seat, has signed up more than 200 people.

Its partner, Armadillo Aerospace of Heath, Texas, plans to build an automated spacecraft - no pilot - that can take up two people at a time.